New Pathways for Energy Efficient Computing Hardware

Abstract

Despite ominous foretelling of a slowdown, the computational throughput has increased by orders of magnitude over the last decade. Energy efficiency is critical not only to maintain this incessant advancement, but also to ensure that electronics does not become a drag on the finite energy resources of the world. This will need a radical rethinking of the basic building blocks that constitute the electronic hardware. In this talk, I shall briefly present how exploiting physics and functional materials to augment CMOS may offer a new pathway in this context. In particular, I shall discuss logic, memory, and backend technologies where we have achieved record performance by combining new capabilities with CMOS. These examples underscore how functional augmentation of CMOS by harnessing new materials could offer opportunities that are otherwise not available through conventional means.